Welcome to the newest installment of our educational Next Level series! In our last episode, Brian Childs equipped copywriters with the tools they need to succeed with SEO. Today, he’s back to share how to use Open Site Explorer to find linking opportunities based upon your competitors’ external inbound links. Read on and level up!

In Mozâ€™s SEO training classes, we discuss how to identify and prioritize sources of backlinks using a mix of tools. One tactic to quickly find high Domain Authority sites that have a history of linking to pages discussing your topic is to study your competitors’ backlinks. This process is covered in-depth during the SEO Link Building Bootcamp.

In this article, Iâ€™ll show how to create and export a list of your competitorâ€™s backlinks that you can use for targeting activities. This assumes you’ve already completed keyword research and have identified competitors that rank well in the search results for these queries. Use those competitors for the following analysis.

When it comes to certain kinds of backlinks, avoiding penalties can be a real gray area. How can you earn the benefits without gaining the scrutiny of Google? In this Whiteboard Friday, Rand will teach you which rules to follow to keep you safe and on the up-and-up, all while improving your link profile.

Click on the whiteboard image above to open a high-resolution version in a new tab!

Video Transcription

Howdy, Moz fans, and welcome to another edition of Whiteboard Friday. This week, we’re going to chat about a question we see a lot here at Moz, around what you should do with websites that you maybe design or build or do work for, your clients’ websites if you’re an agency or consultant, or a web designer or builder, sites that you own but are not your primary website, and widgets and embeds, blogrolls, all these kinds of things where you control the link infrastructure, or could control it, and should you.

I think one of the challenges here is to understand that many folks have recognized that, over the years, widgets, embeds, links from client websites have gotten other sites penalized, potentially even your… Read the rest

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of Moz, Inc.

We all know building backlinks is one of the most important aspects of any successful SEO and digital marketing campaign. However, I believe there is an untapped resource out there for link building: finding your competitors’ broken pages that have been linked to by external sources.

Allow me to elaborate.

Finding the perfect backlink often takes hours, and it can can take days, weeks, or even longer to acquire. Thatâ€™s where the link building method I’ve outlined below comes in. I use it on a regular basis to build relevant backlinks from competitors’ 404 pages.

Please note: In this post, I will be using Search Engine Land as an example to make my points.

Ready to dive in? Great, because I’m going to walk you through the entire link building process now.

First, you need to find your competitor(s). This is as easy as searching for the keyword youâ€™re targeting on Google and selecting … Read the rest

If you want to see how your competitors are gaining a strategic advantage, one of the best tactics to overtake them is to take a deep dive into their backlinks. They leave breadcrumbs behind that reveal their best tactics. Then pivot (no pun intended), glean ideas from their brilliance, and do it even better!

Required skill: pivot tables

If you don’t know how to use pivot tables, you need to check out this video walkthrough. I teach you everything you need to know and then some.

Download example pivot table

I redacted my client’s data from the pivot table in the Excel sheet, but you can get an idea of how I pulled together the data in the “Raw Data” tab and then see how I organized my pivot table in that tab. You can, of course, organize yours however you feel is best. But hopefully this will provide a good jumping-off point. I also sorted my pivot table by domain authority in descending order and then filtered out links from [free-subdomain].wordpress.com.

This post was originally in YouMoz, and was promoted to the main blog because it provides great value and interest to our community. The author’s views are entirely his or her own and may not reflect the views of SEOmoz, Inc.

Hey Mozzers,

My name is Takeshi and I'm a Technical SEO Analyst for the in-house SEO team over at Become.com. During my spare time I like to work on my own projects, and lately I've stumbled across a technique that's been working surprisingly well for me involving memes. I hope you can take some ideas away from this post that you can incorporate into your own SEO and viral marketing campaigns!

How To Use Memes to Build EASY Backlinks & Traffic

Link building. Social engagement. Viral marketing. These are all topics that we grapple with as SEO professionals and inbound marketers, and it can be difficult to come up with strategies to achieve all this from project to project or from client to client. But what if I were to tell you that there's a simple strategy that you can follow to achieve all of these objectives, an easy formula where all … Read the rest